What are some tools/systems every project manager should know about?

I am assuming your question is more pertaining to empowering and motivating (rather than hiring). I can outline some of the practices I have seen really result in high motivation and sense of ownership among engineering teams: * Empathize - Your engineering team will work well and be more motivated if they see you as one of them rather than a person who doesn't understand their function. Show your geeky side to them, and show that you understand their thought process and drivers. * Pick their brain on big and small decisions (roadmap, usability, whatever it is) - Product teams value being heard. The more you position yourself as someone who is WANTS to listen, is keen to have their inputs, you will be surprised at how involved they can get, and also how you can actually tap into a lot of smart ideas/thoughts from them that you can develop on. * Take care to explain - show how you arrive at decisions. Share your research, competitive analysis, and even your thought process on arriving at a feature set or list of things for a release. Its stuff you would have worked on anyway - so no harm sharing with more eyes! * Share customer feedback - nothing motivates your engineers than a positive interaction with a customer. Get them to see customer feedback. Have them sit in and observe some of the usability studies. (B2B - have them see you do some demos or do a successful sales pitch) * Send out interesting articles, insights, business and tech articles with your comments/highlights to them on a regular basis (maybe twice a week?) - maybe even some analysis you did on competition or customer feedback * Engineers like working with people they feel are competent and complement the work they are doing to build a great product. So make sure they see how everyone else around them is also doing a good job and adding value and contributing to the success of the product. * Be transparent about the product/business - Make them feel they are responsible and involved in the business, not just technology. I've seen engineering teams happy about their annual goals having components relating to making revenues, keeping customers happy, or reducing costs. If they are enthused about the business as a whole, they will be more motivated with their engineering efforts * Have a mix of little experiments, R&D, attending to engineering debt, in addition to bug fixes and new features that each engineer gets to spend some time on (based on their interest) * Finally get to know each of your engineers personally, and be aware of what their priorities are. Each of us has different motivations in life, so there is no silver bullet to motivate people. When they know you care for them, they are more motivated :).

Very possible, the hardest part is finding the area of interest. What niche market or opportunity do you see yourself enjoying as a hobby. Enjoyment or purpose is key because passive income often requires putting in some time. At least at the beginning and on going. Here is an example: I'm good at marketing, enjoy talking business tactics, sharing my expertise and like to write, although I'm not good at it. :) One option I saw a few years ago was starting a strategy blog, this blog shares random thoughts, stories, tactics, tips, FYIs, etc. regarding business. I run Adsense on the blog to generat income from there. But my bread and butter when it comes to making passive income from the blog is the affiliate links I have on there. I enjoy reading and think I'm really good at finding great stories, bios, and How To books and I share some of those there, I think I have one of my favorite albums listed there and links to courses and services offered by other companies and some for my own companies (I run a web development firm, a business analytic and advertising team, and a hosting platform that is cheaper than GoDaddy) I have links there. All affiliates or ads to my other services. All I do is drive traffic there once in a while and see the commissions add up. I do my homework in driving the right traffic. Also, another example which is connected to the prior is that I have landing pages (see: trainer.unthink.me for example) where i get registrations for single page landing pages done by a contractor that works for me and we split the earnings. I don't do anything, but post them once In a while on Instagram. I also have an affiliate system for online programs im vested in, and help drive traffic to increase the bottom line and get commission. I also don't do anything for this one. did take time and effort in finding the right market to advertise and message to use. Once that was done the rest takes care of itself. Another example, a friend of mine has a blog about a particular lens piece for a camera loved by many professional photographers, they come to his blog (which he doesn't invest much time in anymore) to find information about tips and how tos for the lens... During the time he updated the blog daily and then weekly he would share his own affiliate links to Amazon and collects money that way. Because the niche was so targeted and there are a ton of people looking for that information he gets good return on that. This is what you call a lifestyle business, but what the people that make money off selling lifestyle businesses don't tell you is that is for those who don't require much income. Another passive income is investing, consider investing in family or friend that maybe wants to start selling Mary Kay or something, you invest in them by buying the products for them. The person sells you collect either an interest or perpetuating until you find some agreement of full repayment to you. Buy a soda or vending machine if you have a truck and are handy with fixing stuff. You can always find deals on snacks and sodas and in a good spot a machine can generate average $50 per cycle. May not sound like much, but if you get yourself a couple of them you have a small income stream that can be saved and used to buy a candy machine or another vending machine... And give you weekend spending money. These are just some ideas I hope help you get your brain flowing to see that you might not need money to do something and if you do you might have more choices than you realized before.

I don't think it is what you are looking for, but MailChimp.com was created by mistake from a services agency. They were sending emails for their clients and the next thing you know, they were making most of their money from send costs and the rest is history. Sorry I can't be more help.

I am based in Canada and ended up opening a US bank account with Harris Bank in Chicago without physically visiting their office. This was about 4 years ago. So maybe contact them and see if they could help you.

We use Salesforce for CRM, so we implemented Financial Force PSA. This has been an excellent solution for us, but it definitely requires a lot of customization to represent your business processes (like any holistic solution would).